After the commitment: Brokerage, fragmentation and the politics of turning planetary health frameworks into operational governance

Signing is the easy part. A government adopts an integrative framework, and then the work begins of turning it into mandates, budgets, staff and accountability. Most of the interesting failure happens after the commitment, not before it.

The thesis asks under what conditions a signed framework produces substantive institutional change rather than fragmented adoption or stalled implementation. It tests brokerage as the mechanism: who carries a framework across sectoral boundaries once the political moment has passed, and what those people can and cannot move.

Three cases carry the comparison. Wales, where the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015 puts the commitment in primary legislation and gives a decade of implementation to read. Brazil, where climate and health integration has been pursued at federal level since 2016 and again since 2024, resting on multilateral agreement and domestic scientific authority rather than statute. China, where ecological civilisation policy has been translated into local accounting practice in Lishui, Zhejiang.

Each case is traced as a sequence of brokerage episodes and coded across five dimensions: formal rules and mandates, resource allocation, monitoring and enforcement, accountability mechanisms, and cross sectoral integration. Each dimension resolves as substantive conversion, fragmented adoption or implementation stalling. The five exist to separate a framework that changed how a state works from one that changed how a state talks.

This is the only research project I run. The entries alongside this one are its parts: the proposal, the literature review, a conceptual paper and the tracker the coding runs on. More will follow as they are written.

Wales is coded. Brazil is scoped and in progress. China follows. São Tomé and Príncipe is held in reserve as a fourth case.